Caturday Special: The Ocelot, Leopardus pardalis

A look at one of the most beautiful coated cats in the world, the ocelot. Small, but not too small, these medium sized cats range from the USA to Argentina, making their living mostly eating small prey and hiding from just about anything else. An adorable cat that was once overhunted for its pelt or to be sold into the pet trade. These things are so damn cute.

Celestial Classics: Artemis

Another in our Celestial Classics series in which we look at aspects of astronomy, usually celestial bodies but also a NASA mission in this case, and the myths that inspired their names. Today is the turn of the Goddess Artemis, the Greek mythological goddess of the hunt, of chastity, of pregnancy and childbirth, of the wilderness, hunting and those aspects of brutality to which humans must accept their place or else be doomed to destroy the very world on which they live. She is my favourite and I won’t hear a word against her!

Caturday Special: The Sand Cat, Felis margarita

The sandcat, one of the cutest and most amazing cats on the planet. This small, adorable bundle of fluff has been known to eat desert monitor lizards its own size and venomous snakes – although mostly it eats small rodents, lizards, birds and insects. They rarely drink, using their efficient kidneys to obtain moisture from their prey. They’re just unbelievable, something this cute should not be so tough but they are hard as nails and can teach us a lot about how we should adapt to our environment rather than unsustainably developing techniques and technologies that force our environment to adapt to us.

Be more sandcat.

We Lack Discipline Reads: The Bet – Chapter 1

We Lack Discipline analyses the first chapter of Vivienne Tuffnell’s excellent novel ‘The Bet’. A hard open, with lots of natural symbolism of death, decay, pain and suffering.

#WaspFlower – Walk 1 – A Gallery

The photographic results of my first major walk attempting to find wasps on flowers for the Big Wasp Survey. I found more than just wasps and so we have beautiful galleries of wasps, beetles, bees, flies, flowers and others!